As the end of the year fast approaches, we’re reflecting on another successful year on the snipe project.
We’ve caught record numbers of snipe at Port Fairy and Canberra (even though we didn’t get any more geolocators), had a great involvement in the two south-eastern snipe counts so far this year (stay tuned for results) and the radio-tracking at Port Fairy is delivering some fascinating results.
2018 is also looking busy with a trip to Japan in May to assist in population surveys in Hokkaido and outreach with Japanese schools, plus a lot data analysis.
Thanks for all your efforts and interest this year, and stay tuned! We leave you this year with a great little animation of snipe from a remote camera trap at St Helens from the Basalt to Bay Landcare Network:
It has been a hectic time for the Latham’s Snipe project team, so much so that we have been very slack in providing updates! So here they are all bundled into one.
Firstly, the bittersweet news from recent catching. We have experienced phenomenal catching success, with 2 catches of 13 birds and our record-breaking catch last weekend of 14! These numbers way surpass anything from last year and we think are an indication of both our increased experience with this species, and more birds being present in Port Fairy than during the previous years of monitoring. But in all this success, we have only managed to retrieve a single geolocator from bird U8. U8 was first captured on September 11 2016 at Powling Street wetlands and was recaptured on Monday 6th November in the wetland itself. However, the logger battery had died so we sent it to Migrate Technology in England to try and retrieve the data. Alas! The logger battery died in early February, before the bird migrated. What a blow to the team.
A misty morning reveals our biggest catch ever of 14 snipe, with our special visitor Rika from Japan in the background
We have also made 2 other between-year recaptures, but neither bird was fitted with a geolocator last year. So we have reached the end of 2017 after 3 months of intensive catching efforts, to not obtain another migration track. We are sorely disappointed, but will make one last attempt in January 2018.
On the plus side we have deployed 26 radio transmitters which our honours student Andrew is tracking as part of his research project. So far around a third of those birds have stayed in the area, providing an interesting comparison to the radio tracking results from last year.
Andrew tracks our faithful snipe in Port Fairy. Photo Rich Chamberlain
Onto counting, and this year has proved far more successful in terms of count effort, site coverage and relative numbers of snipe observed. We are proud to say that well over 80 sites were counted on September 23, contributed by a large number of fabulous volunteers from across all the eastern states and territories. That produced a count of 584 birds, which compares favourably to last January when 639 birds were counted from a similar number of sites, but at a time of the year when there are typically more birds around at core sites. In contrast, a lot of the other sites which usually hold small numbers of snipe had few or no birds at all. The conditions this year have been quite unusual, with SW Victoria, SE South Australia and SW Tasmania all being quite wet, and everywhere being quite dry, particularly NSW and SE Queensland. We wonder if birds have overflown and overlooked smaller sites when passing through the drier lands to return to their regular and reliable sites.
We look forward to the result of this weekend’s count November 25, to find out if this pattern still holds. Please do join the counts if you can. Contact Birgita or Richard for more information.
Jodie receives Environmental Achiever Award
August 30, 2017
Congratulations to Jodie for recently receiving an Environmental Achievers Individual Award from the Glenelg-Hopkins CMA. Jodie has been involved in monitoring, and more recently trying to protect, the Powling Street wetlands for the last 20 years, and has been a driving force of the snipe project since its inception.
Later this year Jodie will head to government house for the state awards. Congratulations and good luck from the snipe team!
This from the Glenelg-Hopkins CMA ‘As an educator, biodiversity officer and writer, Jodie has been a member of the South Beach Wetlands and Landcare Group in Port Fairy since the 1980’s. Jodie’s commitment to conservation and the community education around Port Fairy has provided an outstanding contribution to the protecting and enhancement of the area’s environment’.
After what we hope has been a good breeding season, Latham’s snipe are arriving back in Australia! At the same time, we’ve also had our first paper published – coincidentally on the arrival times of Latham’s snipe!
Jodie and Richard have just returned from a second trip to Japan to participate in a survey of Latham’s Snipe around the Yufutsu plain in Tomakomai. This is the same location that the team joined Japanese researchers from the Wild Bird Society of Japan (WBSJ) last year as part of their catching program and fitting of satellite transmitters at Lake Benten in July. From the visit it is apparent that the area not only constitutes an important staging area for the species but is also a breeding site for a number of individuals. Unfortunately, results from the survey show that the number of individuals present in the area has declined by about 28% when compared to the same survey in 2001.
Japanese and Australian researchers together with some of the 30 volunteers from the Latham’s Snipe survey. (Photo: WBSJ)
It is with some sadness that we report that we have lost transmission from Nozomi. Her transmitter had been providing fixes from Jerrabomberra wetlands and surrounds since the early days after catching. All fixes obtained during March and into April were originating from the same general area, but were becoming increasingly more sporadic. The last fix was April 6, so we have to conclude that the transmitter has fallen off the bird or the bird has been lost.
The upcoming 2017-2018 snipe season will focus on some of the other tracking techniques we have deployed successfully in Port Fairy, including radio tracking. We hope to expand our radio tracking program to Canberra, to learn more about wetland use in key areas within the ACT. In the meantime, we will be following closely advances in bird satellite tracking technology and improvements to device design and size.
In other migration news, we have again been receiving reports of snipe congregating at wetlands in both south-east and Far North QLD, including large numbers being observed at a Cairns site over the last fortnight. It is exciting to see the evidence again this year of migration through eastern Australia and hear about stopover sites.
If you suspect you have a snipe stopover site or are observing larger than usual numbers in your area, please let us know!
Snipe in the media
March 20, 2017
Hokkaido Television Broadcasting have produced a short YouTube documentary on their visit to Canberra in January. View the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezIf5wGmimA.
The Latham’s Snipe team would like to thank Nobu Yamagami and his hard-working cameraman for their diligence and attention to detail during filming in Australia. They were really great to work with.
And we would also like to thank Tatsuya Ura for joining the team and being an critical conduit between the Australian and Japanese snipe researchers,a s well as making a fantastic contribution to the project.
You can also read more about the Japanese Team’s visit to East Gippsland, where they met with RMIT researcher Peter Fisher and locals about the importance of Gippsland wetlands and lakes as refugia for migrating birds.
Nozomi’s transmitter is still sending regular signals from around Jerrabomberra wetlands. Many other snipe have now left the wetland on migration, so we would expect her to leave any day now.
Nozomi 164794 in Canberra and Tsubasa’s PTT 164797 in Gwydir wetlands.
We did not receive any signals from Tsubasa’s transmitter for about 2 weeks. And then around the middle of last week, it mysteriously “switched on” again. The signals were still originating from Gwydir wetlands, and the few transmissions received since them are from the same location. This suggests that the transmitter is no longer attached to the bird. We will continue to monitor it over the coming weeks, and if the opportunity arises, make an attempt to visit the site.
Update on snipe migration
February 27, 2017
As of February 28, Nozomi has still been hanging around the Jerrabomerra wetlands complex, but moving around regularly, as evidenced by satellite fixes of varying accuracy. Other snipe have been sighted from the bird hides foraging in the wetland, so the conditions are obviously still good to support the birds’ continual fattening before departure. Presumably Nozomi and the other snipe are capitalising on this unusually wet summer season and the presence of water and food still in the wetland, so late in the season.
Red dots show higher accuracy satellite fixes for Nozomi over the last week.
Unfortunately, we have had no further satellite transmissions from Tsubasa since early last week. We don’t know if this means Tsubasa had started its migration and lost transmission during flight, or transmissions were lost whilst still in Gwydir wetlands.
We now have fingers crossed that Nozomi lives up to her name and safely undertakes her northward migration.
Snipe migration has started!
February 21, 2017
After a challenging start we are thrilled to learn that P9 Tsubasa has begun its journey. Tsubasa left Canberra on 14th February (clearly no valentines worth hanging around for in Canberra!), probably sometime during the early hours of the morning prior to dawn. The next satellite fixes late afternoon on Feb 15 showed that Tsubasa had stopped somewhere in central NSW west of Yeoval and east of Goobang National Park. There’s not much in that region except scattered farm dams and small, degraded watercourses, so Tsubasa was on its way again and was picked up by the satellites in Gwydir wetlands (northern NSW) on the February 17.
Meanwhile, Nozomi (R0) is still hanging around Jerrabomberra wetlands but her satellite fixes are becomingly increasingly unreliable so we hope that means she is readying herself for departure. Unfortunately some issues with P8 meant that we had to recapture her and remove her harness, so now we are relying on Nozomi and Tsubasa to fly the flag for Canberra snipe. Let’s wish them good luck!
Satellite transmitters fitted to snipe in Canberra January
February 02, 2017
Over Australia Day weekend, Birgita and Rich braved the hot weather of Canberra to again visit Jerrabomberra Wetlands for another attempt to catch birds big enough for satellite transmitters (platform terminal transmitter or PTTs). Birgita and Rich, alongside Lori and Michael from the wetlands centre were joined by a large team of keen volunteers, containing a mix of young rangers, experienced birdos and folk affiliated with Jerra and the Trust. The team was graced with the presence of Tatsuya Ura from the Wild Bird Society of Japan, plus two members of Hokkaido Television Broadcasting (HTB) who were filming the whole weekend, capturing the story of latham’s snipe in Australia. We were also fortunate to have Liza Watts (Australian Japan Foundation program manager) present for the saturday morning processing.
The catching started with net setting friday night and a catch of 2 birds saturday morning in the wetland below the office. Neither were quite large enough for a PTT. As with the previous visit, we discovered that birds were not all leaving the wetland after dark, like they do in Port Fairy. So we decided to change our strategy the following night, and catch the way they do at Benten lake in Hokkaido, by opening nets prior to sunset and checking throughout the night until dawn. This method was rewarded with 4 birds, 3 large enough for PTTs. These were fitted by blearly eyed Birgita and Rich at silly hours of the morning. The birds were released after a brief period holding them to check the harness fit. All flew away strongly, clearly anxious to escape the humans and captivity!
The team unanimously elected to call the first bird (R0) ‘Nozomi’, which means hope in Japanese. The other 2 birds, P8 and P9 are yet to be named, although the popular vote is leaning toward ‘Tsubasa’ (wings) for P9.
It was an exhausting but successful weekend, thanks to the hard work of everyone who participated. We’d like to Lori for everything she did to help organise the weekend, to Alana Simpson who so ably managed and interpreted for HTB, and to the Woodlands and Wetlands Trust and the Australia Japan Foundation for helping fund this trip.
P9 ‘Tsubasa’ sporting her new transmitter.
The catching team waiting for snipe departure time.
Snipe art outreach
January 20, 2017
Hi everyone,
While many of the blog posts focus on the scientific work of the project, our outreach and community engagement continues (and is at least as important as the science).
We’ve been priviledged to have acclaimed Warrnambool artist Fiona Clarke working with children at Port Fairy Consolidated Primary School to develop murals about Latham’s snipe and its journey between Australia and Japan. These murals will be located around Port Fairy, and add to the community awareness of the importance of the area of Latham’s snipe.
More information can be found here (link to the Standard article, and header image taken from the article)
